Bing Adds Facebook Search Results

On Thursday at the Search Marketing Expo's SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Microsoft's senior vice president for Bing, Yusuf Mehdi, announced new integration with Facebook data fan pages and publicly shared links.

On Thursday at the Search Marketing Expo's SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Microsoft's senior vice president for Bing, Yusuf Mehdi, announced new integration with Facebook data fan pages and publicly shared links.

The integration builds on Bing's social networking play initiated with a Twitter tie-in of a year ago. The news comes on the same day Google launched its new search infrastructure, Caffeine and in the midst of widespread Twitter outages.

Bing's Lawrence Kim writes in a Bing Community post that the new features will go live later today and be accessible at bing.com/social. Bing will index data from two Facebook sources: official public Fan pages and shared link from users who've chosed to share updates with "everyone." A Microsoft representative told PCMag.com that "none of the non-Fan Page content can be traced back to the individual user. Microsoft's intention is that the move will enable Bing to deliver fresher trending topic results. The real-time trending topics will also show up on slightly redesigned Bing search pages.

Also announced at the conference were new Bing Webmaster Tools, designed to "provide a simplified, more intuitive experience that delivers a comprehensive view of how Bing indexes their sites." A new Silverlight-enhanced interface will offer charts that graphically show webmasters six-months worth of index and traffic data. More info on these upcoming changes to the tools can be found on the Bing Webmaster blog. The free tools will become available "soon," according to Microsoftno more specific release date was announced.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web...
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